Showing posts with label airport security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label airport security. Show all posts

Friday, May 11, 2012

Has the Underwear Bomber Hoax been Designed to Justify Naked Airport Security Checks?

I recently pointed out that the expose on the underwear bomber terrorist hoax has likely been driven by an undeclared political incentive,

Visible ‘terrorism’ effects, as illustrated above, can be manufactured for political reasons—example to justify the existence and or the expansion of government bureaucracies (such as US Homeland Security) or to promote interests of the military industrial complex or both.

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writing at the lewrockwell.com proposes this source of motivation,

But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb.

What does this bring to mind? Anyone of my generation or any science fiction aficionado immediately thinks of Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.

Written in 1951 but set in our time, Earth is invaded by small creatures that attach to the human body and take over the person. The humans become the puppets of their masters. Large areas of America succumb to the invaders before the morons in Washington understand that the invasion is real and not a conspiracy theory.

On clothed humans, the creatures cannot be detected, and the edict goes out that anyone clothed is a suspect. Everyone must go about naked. Women are not even allowed to carry purses in their hand, because the creature can be in the purse attached to the woman’s hand.

Obviously, if the CIA, the news sources, and Dianne Feinstein’s briefers are correct that defeated al-Qaeda has come up with an “undetectable” bomb, we will have to pass through airport security naked.

In short, create a scenario to justify the TSA’s lust for naked security checks (perhaps this porno entertainment for them).

Could be.

Nonetheless the current trend of airport security checks has been dehumanizing and symptomatic of the expanding rule of tyranny.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Quote of the Day: Terrorism Cannot Take Away Our Freedoms

The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It's our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us—to effectively do the terrorists' job for them—is the greatest harm of all.

That's from Mr. Bruce Schneier, a security expert, in a debate on Airport Security at the Economist (hat tip Cato's Julian Sanchez)